His arrival was announced by the Vatican on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. “My visit, perhaps, is more of an obstruction than a help,” he said upon his arrival, according to NBC. “I wanted to greet you, but I didn’t want to be an inconvenience, that’s why I let some time pass.”

The pontiff added that he had waited for “some things to be fixed,” before visiting, including the local school. “But since the beginning I felt that I had to come to you, simply to tell you that I am close to you, nothing else, and that I pray for you,” he said.

The 6.2-magnitude earthquake struck the Apennine regions of central Italy on Aug. 24, killing an estimated 247 people and causing “apocalyptic scenes” near the epicenter. Amatrice, Accumoli, Posta and Arquata del Tronto were the worst hit towns, but even residents in Rome, some 170 km (105 miles) away, were woken by the quake.

The pope started his tour at the makeshift school set up in containers, meeting with more than 100 elementary and middle school students, some of whom gave him drawings. He also met with a man who lost his wife and children in the quake, the Vatican said.

Pope Francis gave Leonardo DiCaprio an audience at the Vatican Thursday afternoon, bringing the two luminaries together in one place.

DiCaprio, who won an award at the World Economic Forum this year for his environmental philanthropy, started by giving the Pontiff a book with works by the artist Hieronymus Bosch inside. He opened to a page with the triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” which he said hung over his crib.

“As a child I didn’t quite understand what it all meant, but through my child’s eyes it represented a planet, the utopia we had been given, the overpopulation, excesses, and the third panel we see a blackened sky that represents so much to me of what’s going in in the environment,” DiCaprio told Francis. DiCaprio also handed the Pope a check for his charity.

The Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews released a document outlining developments in the church’s stance towards Judaism, including that Jews do not need to be converted to Catholicism to find salvation since God did not revoke his covenant with Israel.

“The Church is therefore obliged to view evangelisation [sic] to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views,” the document says. “In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”

The document does not constitute official church doctrine, but does communicate the stance of the Holy See. The report’s authors also called for Catholics to work with Jews to fight antisemitism.

“Because of the strong bond of friendship between Jews and Catholics, the Catholic Church feels particularly obliged to do all that is possible with our Jewish friends to repel anti-Semitic tendencies,” the document states. “Pope Francis has repeatedly stressed that a Christian can never be an anti-Semite, especially because of the Jewish roots of Christianity.”

The report marks the 50th anniversary of Vatican II, the council that first began improving relations between Judaism and Catholicism by renouncing the concept of Jewish collective responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ.

“Please, no armoured doors in the Church, everything open,” the 78-year-old told pilgrims in St Peter’s square, reports Italy’s AGI news. “There are places in the world where doors should not be locked with a key. There are still some but there are also many where armoured doors have become the norm.”

“We must not surrender to the idea that we must apply this way of thinking to every aspect of our lives,” the Pope added. “To do so to the Church would be terrible.”

While his comments do not explicitly refer to the Paris attacks, security measures have been stepped up in Italy, where 700 extra troops have been deployed in Rome. This week, it was announced that the city’s airspace will be closed to drones for the duration of the upcoming Catholic jubilee year, based on concerns about the potential dangers posed by remote-controlled aircraft, reports AFP.

The Vatican has taken in a family who fled Damascus, just days after Pope Francis urged Catholic parishes across the world to assist refugees.

The Syrian family of four, all Melkite Greek Catholics, arrived on Sept. 6 and are being housed in the city-state’s Santa Anna Parish, according to a statement from the Vatican.

Pope Francis said previously both the Vatican’s parishes would house refugee families, though it has not provided details about the actions of the second parish, St. Peter’s Basilica.

“The procedures for requesting international protection were initiated immediately,” the Vatican Information Service said. The Santa Anna Parish will now assist the family for the first six months after their asylum request, the statement continued, because they cannot legally accept paid work.

The parish is housing the family in a Vatican apartment near St. Peter’s Basilica.

Pope Francis, who marks his second year as leader of the Catholic Church this week, has garnered the type of favorability ratings that any leader would envy. In a Pew poll released last week, nine out of ten Catholics in America gave the Pope high marks—nearly on par with the hugely popular Pope John Paul II’s top ratings. Around the world, sixty percent of Catholic and non-Catholic respondents alike said they viewed Francis favorably.

And his achievements have extended beyond popularity. As Francis’s tenure reaches the two-year mark, the Pope can already look back on significant economic reforms at the Vatican, published a report condemning unbridled capitalism and fueled an evolving discussion on divorce and homosexuality throughout the Church (not to mention being named TIME’s Person of the Year in 2013).

1. Set an exampleThe reformist Pope immediately set his sights on the Vatican’s finances, aiming to clean up a regular source of scandal. For the Pope—who took his name from the saint who devoted himself to a life of poverty—financial reform was a priority because it brought “together the three vices that distress him more than anything else: corruption, exaggerated clerical privilege and indifference to the poor,” Allen writes

But he also knew that ensuring clean books at the highest levels would set an example of good governance for the entire Church and clear the path for pursuing a wider agenda. “Today, perhaps the most audacious of all of Pope Francis’s plans is to make the Vatican into a global model of best practices in financial administration—not just as an end in itself but as a way of leading the Church at all levels to clean up its act,” Allen writes.

2. Don’t just hire your friendsAustralian Cardinal George Pell was an unlikely candidate for spearheading Francis’s financial reforms. A staunch conservative, Pell was privately disappointed with the Pope’s election, concerned that he would lead the Vatican down a liberal path. In size–he’s a 6-foot-3 former Australian football player–and in personality, he also differed from the soft-spoken Pontiff.

But Francis had heard Pell’s rants against the status of the Church’s finances and knew that his blunt style would be effective in pushing reforms through the traditional institution. At a meeting in March 2014 during which the two spoke Italian because neither was comfortable in each other’s language, Francis asked Pell to become his finance czar.

3. Take advice seriouslyFrom the very beginning, Francis has demonstrated a willingness to listen to those around him. As his first substantial move in office, for example, he created a Council of Cardinal Advisers comprising eight members from around the global who hold ideologically diverse views. The group has since advised him on each of his major actions, and Allen calls it the “the most important decision-making force in the Vatican.” Meanwhile, Pope Francis has given renewed significance to the Synod of Bishops, an advisory group that Pope John Paul II was known to occasionally sit through while reading a book. Francis, by contrast, attended one meeting almost entirely unannounced to join in the discussion (Allen compared it to a U.S. president walking into a meeting of a House committee), and he placed a heavy emphasis on the rare Extraordinary Synod that he convened to discuss family issues like divorce and remarriage.

4. But also be willing to ignore adviceThe Pope has also been willing to act unilaterally to ensure that his agenda moves forward, such as when he named Bishop Nunzio Galantino to be secretary-general of the powerful Episcopal Conference of Italy in December 2013. Galantino had a reputation of modesty that reflected Pope Francis’s persona,eschewing, for example, formal titles and rejecting a secretary or chauffeur. But he was not terribly popular with the Italian clergy. When Francis asked for potential names to fill the role of secretary-general, nearly 500 Italian clergymen submitted their recommendations and Galantino received only a single nod. Francis chose him anyway.

5. Be accessibleAs the head of the Vatican, Pope Francis has plenty of headaches to deal with at home. But he’s also the leader of nearly 1.1 billion Catholics, and he has made an impressive effort to connect with his followers. There’s no better example of his outreach efforts than the cold-calls he makes to unexpecting people around the world. There was the call to Michele Ferri, the 14-year-old brother of a gas station operator who had been killed in an armed robbery; a call to a Vatican critic who was sick in the hospital; a call to an Italian woman who had beseeched the Pope in a letter to help her solve the mystery of her daughter’s murder; and many more that have not been reported in the media. In one case that was reported, the Pope dialed (he does the calling, not an aide) a convent of cloistered Carmelite nuns in Spain to wish a happy New Year. When they didn’t pick up, he left a message, jokingly asking, “What are the nuns doing that they can’t answer?” (praying, according to a local media report) He later called back, and this time the nuns were gathered around the phone to talk with Francis on speakerphone.

Pope Francis has once again spoken out about the global economic climate, decrying an economic system that “seems fatally destined to suffocate hope and increase risks and threats.”

Speaking in Rome, the Pope condemned what he called a “throwaway culture created by the powers that control the economic and financial policies of the globalized world.”

But he proposed a solution of sorts, in the form of economic cooperatives that would help spread wealth equally: “Money at the service of life can be managed in the right way by cooperatives, on condition that it is a real cooperative where capital does not have command over men but men over capital.”

He quoted his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, in calling money the “devil’s dung,” according to Vatican Radio. “When money becomes an idol, it controls man’s choices,” he added. “It makes him a slave.”

This is far from the first time the Pope has addressed the condition of the working class in the globalized world; in a speech at the U.N. last year, the Pope asked world leaders to redistribute wealth.

]]>http://time.com/3727280/pope-francis-inequality-throwaway-culture/feed/0Pope Francis delivers his speech during a special audience with members of the confederation of Italian cooperatives in Paul VI hall at the VaticanPope Francis to Families: Get Off Your Screens and Actually Talk to Each Otherhttp://time.com/3680634/pope-francis-screens/
http://time.com/3680634/pope-francis-screens/#respondFri, 23 Jan 2015 18:49:31 +0000http://time.com/?p=3680634]]>

“By growing daily in our awareness of the vital importance of encountering others, we will employ technology wisely, rather than letting ourselves be dominated by it,” the Pontiff said Friday in his annual message for World Communications Day.

In other words, cut down on your screen time, kids.

Not that mothers and fathers aren’t beyond reproach: “Parents are the primary educators,” he said, “but they cannot be left to their own devices.”

“The media can be a hindrance if they become a way to avoid listening to others, to evade physical contact, to fill up every moment of silence and rest, so that we forget that ‘silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist,'” Pope Francis said.

This isn’t the first time the Pope has implied those family-centric Apple ads might be misleading. “Maybe many young people waste too many hours on futile things,” like “chatting on the Internet or with smartphones,” he said last year.

Even in 1967, long before the dawn of the selfie, Pope Paul VI remarked upon the rapidly expanding world of communications, noting how television and other media leave “their deep mark upon the mentality and the conscience of man who is being pressed and almost overpowered by a multiplicity of contradictory appeals.”

It’s like they say in Proverbs 18:2: “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion [on Twitter].”

]]>http://time.com/3680634/pope-francis-screens/feed/0VATICAN-POPE-AUDIENCEPope Francis to Make American Missionary a Sainthttp://time.com/3669447/pope-make-american-missionary-saint/
http://time.com/3669447/pope-make-american-missionary-saint/#respondThu, 15 Jan 2015 16:58:17 +0000http://time.com/?p=3669447]]>Pope Francis promised Thursday to canonize an 18th century missionary during his visit to the United States in September.

The pontiff said he would make a saint out of Junipero Serra, a missionary who brought Christianity to the western United States in the 1700s.

“He was the evangelizer of the Western United States,” Francis told reporters on the papal plane as he flew from Sri Lanka to the Philippines as part of his Asia tour.

He is scheduled to visit Philadelphia on his visit, but is also expected to visit New York to address the United Nations…